The 2006 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards were hosted tonight by Chris DiBona and Nat Torkington at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon. Attendees at the convention center celebrated as five fellow open source members were recognised at the second annual awards ceremony.

The winners are individuals who have worked tirelessly on their projects and in their community roles to make significant contributions to open source. We're pleased to announce that the winners are ....

"Why the lookup web service? The Google Maps API doesn't just let you map an address. You need to supply the Maps API with a longitude and latitude to place a marker on a map (or even to center a map on a city). The geocoding web service translates a valid address into longitude and latitude; you can pass the result to the Maps API."

Googlers are making the pilgrimage to the 8th annual OSCON hosted by O'Reilly Media Inc., on July 24-28, in Portland Oregon. We're really excited about having many Googlers speak at the conference this year, covering a broad range of topics, as follows:

Alex Martelli, on Python in the Enterprise andHighly-technical Management of Software Development

For those following Google's Summer of Code program, we're hosting a Google Summer of Code Community BOF, on Wednesday July 26 at 7:30pm, Room D136. If you are a mentor, student or well-wisher come along and meet other GSoCers and Googlers behind the program.

The BoF sessions at OSCON are free of charge and open to the public, so you are welcome to visit the BoF even if you cannot attend the conference.

Several dozen Googlers active in open source projects will be in attendance - too many to list here. We hope to have the opportunity to meet many of you, so please drop by the booth or come and find us after the talks. See you next week!

If you plan to be at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference next week in Portland, be sure to attend the 2006 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards. Five individuals will be recognized for significant contribution to the open source community.

The awards will be hosted by Chris DiBona and Nat Torkington on Tuesday 25th July, 7:00pm, Portland Ballroom. The categories for the 2006 awards are as follows :

Best Legal Eagle

Best Toolmaker

Best All-Round Developer

Best Corporate Liason

Best Community Activist

For more information and details of last years winners check the OSCON site.

And if you are not at the event, remember to check back here after Tuesday for the winners!

Among other funding activities, Google's Open Source Program Office is sponsoring Martin Michlmayr's PhD research on "Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free Software Projects: Exploring the Impact of Release Management."

While Martin won't be publishing his findings until he completes his thesis in 2007, Bruce Byfield with NewsForge has just published an article which provides an overview of Martin's research and into quality assurance, release management and usability in free software projects.

Proxy for Web Applications: "The AuthSub API gives your web application the ability to access a user's Google services accounts without handling the user's login information. This API offers a secure mode, in which the web application can register with Google for greater security."

His blog post explains a few of the specific problems he encountered while creating it:

"The most basic issue with implementing this is geocoding all of the location strings (like "Canal & Broadway") to a latitude/longitude pair... It is not perfect, but since the set of addresses is pretty tightly constrained, I was able to add some rewriting rules to make the input more easily parsed. As of right now, 54% of the addresses are geocoded."

"I didn't want to directly scrape the HTML of the site to extract all of the quotes. I ended up using the data stored in Google Reader's archive of the site's feed. This allowed me to get at the quotes themselves more easily, without having to worry about the chrome of the site."

"Instead of each marker being its own overlay, I put all of them in the same overlay (see the QuotesOverlay class). Additionally, I did not split each marker into several layers (shadow, image, click area) - having the shadow be part of the image works well enough."